Photo by Sam Chandler
Over the Mountain Track Club members at the starting line during a June practice at Brock’s Gap Intermediate School as their coach, Stephen Burns, keeps their time.
Sharena Williams sat on a step a few feet away from the track at Brock’s Gap Intermediate School as the blue skies overhead turned gray. She watched one of her two sons, 7-year-old Christian, zoom around the asphalt oval, his little legs churning in rhythm with his arms, eyes locked on the ground in front of him.
Christian’s brother, 9-year-old Cameron, was stationed nearby. Alongside a group of his teammates, he, too, worked on developing the skills needed for his new favorite sport.
“They love being out here, just enjoying the running,” Williams said. “I wish it was something I could have started them in earlier.”
This is the first summer the siblings have participated in track and field with the Over the Mountain Track Club, a youth team started in 2016 by former University of Alabama runner Stephens Burns and Hoover High School alumnus Jeff Moran.
Burns and his wife, Lisa, serve as the main track coaches, while Josh Caldwell and Mary Birdwell oversee the field events. Caldwell threw collegiately at Samford University. Birdwell, meanwhile, coached for years at Hoover, and the school’s track is named in her honor.
The OTM Track Club is, in a way, the latest iteration of the Hoover Parks and Recreation Track and Field team that Birdwell spearheaded for nearly four decades. It stopped meeting permanently a couple of summers ago until Stephen Burns, sensing a need, revived it.
“I really am glad to see that because there are a lot of kids that, if they just knew where to go, would do track and field,” said Birdwell, sitting next to the Brock’s Gap long jump pit advising her pupils.
The Burnses didn’t set out to start a track club when they began entering their sons, Elijah and Luke, in meets two summers ago. It just happened naturally. Whenever the family posted about the competitions on Facebook, they received numerous inquiries from curious friends who expressed interest on behalf oftheir children.
They heard the question time and again: “How’d y’all get involved in that?”
They saw a need and filled it.
“We just thought, ‘You know what, let’s give it a shot. Let’s see if we can form a track club,’” Stephen Burns said.
With the guidance of Birdwell and the help of Moran, the Burnses launched it last summer. Thirty kids came out for the inaugural season. This year it doubled in size, as more than 60 young athletes ages 5-13 participated. Stephen Burns said nearly half of the club competed in weekend meets, while the other half opted to attend only the twice-a-week practices on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.
Traditionally, the club meets in the first half of the summer for six weeks. In that period, kids are exposed to the different disciplines of track and field: running, jumping and throwing.
“It’s all about enjoying it and having a good attitude, if you win or if you lose,” said 9-year-old Elijah Burns, who likes to run the 1,500 meters and throw javelin.
In addition to teaching the sport’s fundamentals, Stephen Burns selects a thematic “character word” to talk about during each week of practice. One week he focuses on endurance, another week on perseverance.
He wants the kids to know that what they learn on the track will apply beyond the finish line. He speaks from experience.
The 2004 UA track and field letterman has battled cancer three times in the past five years. As of June, he’d been in remission for 18 months, his perseverance prevailing even in the bleakest of moments.
“I think the purpose, to sum it up shortly, is to teach them about the sport and then teach them life lessons that they can learn ... about growing and becoming better people,” Stephen Burns said.
